The Spell of the Rockies

by Enos A. Mills

The larger of these two incipient fires was burning quietly, and that night I camped within its orbit. Toward morning the wind began to blow, this slow-burning surface fire began to leap, and before long it was a crown fire, traveling rapidly among the tree-tops. It swiftly expanded into an enormous delta of flame. At noon I looked back and down upon it from a mountain-top, and it had advanced about three miles into a primeval forest sea, giving off more smoke than a volcano.

I went a day's journey and met a big fire that was coming aggressively forward against the wind. It was burning a crowded, stunted growth of forest that stood in a deep litter carpet. The smoke, which flowed freely from it, was distinctly ashen green; this expanded and maintained in the sky a smoky sheet that was several miles in length.

Before the fire lay a square mile or so of old burn which was covered with a crowded growth of lodge-pole pine that stood in a deep, criss-crossed entanglement of fallen fire-killed timber. A thousand or more of these long, broken dead trees covered each acre with wreckage, and in this stood upward of five thousand live young ones. This would make an intensely hot and flame-writhing fire. It appears that a veteran spruce forest had occupied this burn prior to the fire. The fire had occurred fifty-seven years before. Trees old and young testified to the date. In the margin of the living forest on the edge of the burn were numerous trees that were fire-scarred fifty-seven years before; the regrowth on the burn was an even-aged fifty-six-year growth.

That night, as the fire neared the young tree growth, I scaled a rock ledge to watch it. Before me, and between the fire and the rocks, stood several veteran lodge-pole pines in a mass of dead-and-down timber. Each of these trees had an outline like that of a plump Lombardy poplar. They perished in the most spectacular manner. Blazing, wind-blown bark set fire to the fallen timber around their feet; this fire, together with the close, oncoming fire-front, so heated the needles on the lodge-poles that they gave off a smoky gas; this was issuing from every top when a rippling rill of purplish flame ran up one of the trunks. Instantly there was a flash and white flames flared upward more than one hundred feet, stood gushing for a few seconds, and then went out completely. The other trees in close succession followed and flashed up like giant geysers discharging flame. This discharge was brief, but it was followed by every needle on the trees glowing and changing to white incandescence, then vanishing. In a minute these leafless lodge-poles were black and dead.

The fire-front struck and crossed the lodge-pole thicket in a flash; each tree flared up like a fountain of gas and in a moment a deep, ragged-edged lake of flame heaved high into the dark, indifferent night. A general fire of the dead-and-down timber followed, and the smelter heat of this cut the green trees down, the flames widely, splendidly illuminating the surrounding mountains and changing a cloud-filled sky to convulsed, burning lava.

Not a tree was left standing, and every log went to ashes. The burn was as completely cleared as a fireswept prairie; in places there were holes in the earth where tree-roots had burned out. This burn was an ideal place for another lodge-pole growth, and three years later these pines were growing thereon as thick as wheat in a field. In a boggy area within the burn an acre or two of aspen sprang up; this area, however, was much smaller than the one that the fire removed from the bog. Aspens commonly hold territory and extend their holdings by sprouting from roots; but over the greater portion of the bog the fire had either baked or burned the roots, and this small aspen area marked the wetter part of the bog, that in which the roots had survived.

After destroying the lodge-pole growth the fire passed on, and the following day it burned away as a quiet surface fire through a forest of scattered trees. It crept slowly forward, with a yellow blaze only a few inches high. Here and there this reddened over a pile of cone-scales that had been left by a squirrel, or blazed up in a pile of broken limbs or a fallen tree-top; it consumed the litter mulch and fertility of the forest floor, but seriously burned only a few trees.

Advancing along the blaze, I came upon a veteran yellow pine that had received a large pot-hole burn in its instep. As the Western yellow pine is the best fire-fighter in the conifer family, it was puzzling to account for this deep burn. On the Rocky Mountains are to be found many picturesque yellow pines that have a dozen times triumphed over the greatest enemy of the forest. Once past youth, these trees possess a thick, corky, asbestos-like bark that defies the average fire. Close to this injured old fellow was a rock ledge that formed an influential part of its environment; its sloping surface shed water and fertility upon its feet; cones, twigs, and trash had also slid down this and formed an inflammable pile which, in burning, had bored into its ankle. An examination of its annual rings in the burned hole revealed the fact that it too had been slightly burned fifty-seven years before. How long would it be until it was again injured by fire or until some one again read its records?

Until recently a forest fire continued until stopped by rain or snow, or until it came to the edge of the forest. I have notes on a forest fire that lived a fluctuating life of four months. Once a fire invades an old forest, it is impossible speedily to get rid of it. "It never goes out," declared an old trapper. The fire will crawl into a slow-burning log, burrow down into a root, or eat its way beneath a bed of needles, and give off no sign of its presence. In places such as these it will hibernate for weeks, despite rain or snow, and finally some day come forth as ferocious as ever.

About twenty-four hours after the lodge-pole blaze a snow-storm came to extinguish the surface fire. Two feet of snow—more than three inches of water—fell. During the storm I was comfortable beneath a shelving rock, with a fire in front; here I had a meal of wild raspberries and pine-nuts and reflected concerning the uses of forests, and wished that every one might better understand and feel the injustice and the enormous loss caused by forest fires.